PlainEdit.NET is a powerful plain text editor with an interesting set of features.

The tabbed interface is an immediate plus, allowing you to open multiple documents at the same time. There's good file compatibility, too. PlainEdit.NET can open, edit and save ANSI, UTF-8, Unicode and Unicode big-endian files, with Windows, Mac and Unix line breaks.

The program offers a surprising level of control over your page layout. You can define orientation (portrait or landscape), colours, margins, indentations, headers and footers. The latter can easily be customised with date, time, page numbers, file name and more.

A capable search and replace tool supports regular expressions, and can work across files, as well as open documents.

There are plenty of time-saving clipboard tools. A "Copy & Add" adds the currently selected text to the contents of the clipboard, rather than replacing it; and Insert > Clipboard options insert the contents of the clipboard before or after any selected lines.

PlainEdit.NET has some unusual extras. Select Insert > Console Output, say, then type a console command, and its output will be inserted into your document.

Of course this is all very configurable. Not happy with a certain keyboard shortcut, perhaps? No problem, you can freely set or edit any of the standard shortcuts to suit your needs.

And if this isn't enough, PlainEdit.NET also supports several plugins. There are tools to help you select and insert colours in various formats; extract email addresses and URLs; and export the document as a hex dump, HTML file and more.

Verdict:

A likeable text editor with plenty of interesting features, especially for developers and more technical users.

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

8.48 brings:
- Optimized grass rendering and procedural foliage system preview
- Plugins available in Marketplace
- Improved accuracy for motion blur
- New Tone Mapper
- Support for all the latest VR hardware including Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Steam VR and HTC Vive, Leap Motion, and Sony's Project Morpheus for PlayStation 4
- "Scrubbable" network replays with rewind support and live time scrubbing
- Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI